


Iscariot

by schrodingers__cat (orphan_account)



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Character Analysis, Gen, Introspection, Iscariot by Walk the Moon is lovely and also perfect for this, I’ve got siblings I’m rlly close to, POV Second Person, and if I was in his place, guess who’s late to another fandom !!!, idk if I’d be able to do it, listen I love Taako forgives Lucretia fics as much as the next gal but like, obligatory Lucretia and Taako fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 16:56:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20312890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/schrodingers__cat
Summary: Lucretia is an only child.(It’s not her fault, but it really, really is.)





	Iscariot

**Author's Note:**

> _I never imagined you dead_   
_But tell me, are you even aware_   
_That all we did, you undo_   
_Iscariot, you fool_

Lucretia is an only child. 

She grew up with a kindly housewife mother and a sharply intelligent father. Her father taught her how to read people, and her mother taught her how to write. She had no brothers, no sisters. 

She had friends, certainly. Her best friend was a shy little halfling girl named Abigail, and they did everything together for all thirteen years they were in school. They giggled on bleachers during gym class about people that weren’t real, people with happy endings and grand adventures. They went home at the end of the day. 

(Abigail wakes up from a black-tar dream one day and wonders what happened to Lucy-Lu, lost in the distant, vast void of space. She mourns, and she recovers. She tells her children about the wallflowers Lucy-Lu and Abby-Babs and their kindergarten nicknames and terrible homemade stories in brightly colored journals. She does not tell them about Madame Director and a white staff and a moon base and an incredible shield, because she was dreaming about still-storm skies and black opals when everyone heard the story and the song.)

Lucretia called Abigail her sister. And really, after a hundred years of life and death, everyone aboard the Starblaster formed a makeshift family. 

It’s still different, though. In a nearly unquantifiable way, it’s still different. 

———

Lucretia and Magnus and Merle and Barry are all only children. Lucretia had her parents and she had Abigail, and Magnus had his father and a retinue of scrappy stray dogs, Barry had his mother, and Merle’s community was so closely-contained every adult was an aunt or an uncle and every child was either a best friend or sucked it up.  
They don’t know, though. They are still only children.

Cap’n’port knew. Knows. He had eight younger siblings back on your plane. They all showed up to the Starblaster’s launch. They gave him a tackle-hug and bad advice and pulled at his mustache and asked him to bring them back something cool. He’d said “Just you wait, I’ll bring you the greatest work-trip souvenirs in the multiverse,” and then he’d never seen them again. 

(Their faces were burned in his mind throughout the cycles. He couldn’t save them. But he could save the six fellow explorers that somehow wormed their way to ‘family’ status, and by every celestial he was—is—going to do it.) 

Cap’n’port knows, and his hand is just as stiff as yours when it shakes Lucretia’s, and it makes you a little sad, because you remember when he’d warmly put his hand on her shoulder and tell her about how much potential she had, and how proud he already was of her. (It doesn’t make you _too_ sad, though, because you remember when you’d transmute her more ink when she ran out, and she’d draw little cartoon comics of everyone and leave them on your desk. You remember your nickname for her was “Goosey” because your sister called her “Little Lucy-Goosey” once. And you remember when you forgot all of those things.) 

———

It’s her own idea of family that Lucretia uses for her plan. It’s Lucretia’s idea of siblings, based off of the love between all of you, based off of years of observation and personal experience. 

It works fine, for Magnus and Merle. Their idea of family is the same as hers, and the erasure is complete and whole. (It would’ve worked for Barry, had you not—well.)

She doesn’t realize that it might be different for you and your sister, for your Captain. She doesn’t even consider that she could be wrong. She thinks that, if Abigail died and was erased from her, she’d be alright, she’d be happy, because... well, everything would be erased. Gone. (Abigail wasn’t a part of her. The Starblaster crew was indescribably close, but you all weren’t a part of each other like that, like you and your sister were.)

———

Lucretia doesn’t know what it’s like to have a sibling. 

She doesn’t know what it’s like for someone to share your face, share your eyes and your hair and your skin and your bones (and you still don’t see it, when people point it out. Don’t you see, my eyes are a shade bluer. Hers have more green. Don’t you see, I have more freckles. Look closer, the shape of my nose is sharper than hers, my hair is straighter, and hers has redder highlights. But... you do see it, sometimes gleefully, sometimes not. It’s in a word you say simultaneously with the same tone, or an odd hand gesture, reserved for frustration with each other. A smile at a friend’s joke that reforms your faces into something like a mirror, when before you thought they were as different as different could be). 

Lucretia doesn’t know what it’s like to never know life without someone. To just know that she’s always been there. That you’ve been shaping each other’s lives since forever. 

She doesn’t know what it’s like to have been exhausted with each other, to have argued and fought and fought viciously because you know each other too well. When you both forget it completely the next day, laughing and joking and bickering about some half-forgotten memory that you both remember differently. 

She doesn’t know what it’s like to cry because your sister is crying, and you don’t even know why she’s crying but she’s sad and that makes you sad, and then she’s sad that she’s making you sad, and you have to hold back more tears because that’s just unacceptable. 

She doesn’t know what it’s like to feel that heavy anger. Not any burning malice or a fiery desire for vengeance—just a heavy stone in your chest that says, as you grip your sister’s wrist and take her away from the man that tore her heart, you will be back. And you will do what you have to do. 

She doesn’t know what it’s like to need to care for someone. To know exactly what she needs, down to the exact stroke of your fingers in her hair and the smell of something baking, something with brown sugar and vanilla and practically drowned in cinnamon. To do it silently, without asking questions that don’t need to be asked, just knowing. And needing to do it. Feeling an almost physically painful _tearing_ at your chest when you can’t, or when she won’t let you. 

Lucretia doesn’t know. Lucretia can’t know. 

(It’s not her fault, but it is, but it isn’t, but it definitely is, but it can’t be.) 

———

Lucretia doesn’t know what it’s like to have your sister taken away from you. Not taken away like being kidnapped, far apart. Not even taken away like death takes and hates giving back. She was taken away like she never existed, like something that was the most fundamental part of you was just... gone. Not vanished, not destroyed. It _never existed_, and your foundations and walls built themselves up around the hole it left, covering it up until you didn’t even notice the emptiness. 

You could feel it, though. You could feel it.

It’s been years, and sometimes you still wake up feeling it, until you remember that she’s living just down the street and you aren’t crumbling under the weight of your own missing puzzle pieces anymore. 

Lucretia will never feel that, her loneliness was and still is a self-imposed self-sacrifice that’s more of a heavy weight than a gaping abyss. She knew she’d be lonely and kept on going, reforging herself from silver into iron in the process. She will never know what it’s like to feel like that loneliness was just always there. She never had any missing puzzle pieces. She doesn’t wake up with a sharp-edged hole in her chest, only to remember that it isn’t real, and never was. She wakes up with a sigh and a hand dragging across her face and seeing worry lines in the mirror. Hers is a different loneliness, self-wrought and weighted. Both of yours could have been avoided, if only you’d had more time.

(Funny. You’d all thought you had all the time in the world.)

———

This is the contrast, the conflict. Because you pointed your sister’s staff at Goosey and had you finished your countdown you would’ve fired. Probably. 

That’s the thing. You don’t know.

Everyone else thinks you wouldn’t have. Everyone else was remembering the nicknames and the cartoon doodles and the living and the dying and the food and the ducks and the running, and the running, and the running.

You were remembering your _entire life_. You were remembering your heart. (You were remembering that you had one, to begin with.)

You pointed the staff you took from your sister’s bones at the woman you once thought of as some kind of family, and all you could think was _enemy. Traitor_. You probably looked insane, but you don’t remember much about it other than feeling like you were being slowly crushed underneath the weight of something you couldn’t bear. You probably cried. You remember how stiff your hand had felt, from how tightly you’d gripped the staff.

And you’re fairly certain, had Magnus not said anything, had Merle stood by, you would have fired. 

———

You’d been happy in the lives she made you, but (and you wouldn’t dare say this to Magnus or Merle) it felt like—like a forced happiness. You were happy because you couldn’t remember what made you sad in the first place. Of course you were happy. 

But while you were busy being happy, Barry was busy trying to find your sister and save the world, and your sister was busy being dead. 

You wonder, sometimes, if the bond engine still worked while you were scattered to the winds, or if you’d been stranded in this world without even realizing it. You don’t dare ask.

(It didn’t. The second that Lucretia landed the Starblaster safely on the ground, the engine sputtered and went out, completely lifeless.)

———

This is the contrast. The conflict. 

Because when she looks at you she remembers two different people. She remembers the blank-faced cold-hearted idiot wizard who was her fault, her fault, because he was ice without fire and she was the one who took that fire away. And she remembers the most powerful transmutation wizard of the century, who slowly but surely took down his walls brick by brick and forced everyone to eat family dinners together, and hung her little cartoon comics up in his room. 

And when you look at her you see _enemy_, you see _traitor_, and you see little Goosey with her shy smile and ornate pens. You can’t reconcile the two in your head, and if you travelled back in time to warn yourself of what’s to come you wouldn’t believe it, because you’re something like a family and family doesn’t do that to each other. 

———

You all go out for dinner at some restaurant Magnus picked and it’s been years but you carefully don’t look at her. Your sister gives you a _look_ and you pretend you’re chastised but really just savor that she can give you that look now. 

It’s a bit of a dance, but you and Cap’n’port do it perfectly, you think. Don’t bring it up, don’t look too closely at her face, talk to your sister and your brother-in-law and make fun of Magnus and Merle. When you talk about the ‘good times’ you include her, but just barely, just enough to acknowledge she’d been there and she’d been important. Nothing heartfelt. Nothing too close. 

You carefully, carefully don’t call her Goosey, because that would be too much for both of you. 

———

Lucretia doesn’t know what it’s like to have a sibling. She can’t know. 

(And it’s not her fault, but it really, really is. But it can’t. But it has to be.)

**Author's Note:**

> _You know you had it coming my friend, my friend_   
_You know you had it coming my brother, oh my brother_   
_Had it coming my friend, my friend_   
_You had it coming_


End file.
